A word or phrase that has more than one meaning

Learning English can be fun. It can be daunting. It can be empowering. It can also be confusing, on occasion. But one thing it definitely isn’t is boring. Even the most fluent English speakers are often surprised when they discover something new about the language: a grammar rule brought to their attention for the first time, a word that they’d never come across before or, even more surprisingly, a familiar word used in an unexpected way! Yes, it is quite common for one English word to have two (or more) completely different meanings.

The way to tell these same-spelling, different-meaning words apart is to pay attention to the context in which they are being used. This will make much more sense when we see these words in action, so let’s look at some examples.

Here is a word that has more than one meaning:

Mine

• as a noun: a place underground from where minerals are extracted
  Peter has been working at a coal mine since April.
• as a possessive pronoun: to show possession
  This is your bag, not mine.

Isn’t that interesting? The same word—mine—is used in both example sentences, but it means two entirely different things in each.

Here is a list of ten other English words with more than one meaning:

1. Interest

• as a noun: wanting to learn or know more about something
  She developed an interest in programming after taking a course in college and now she is a
  professional programmer.
• as a noun: additional money charged on a borrowed sum
  I am paying a high rate of interest on my home loan.
• as a verb: to arouse curiosity or attention
  We built interest in our product by outlining its many benefits on our social media channels.

2. Date

• as a noun: the day of the month or year
  We still haven’t set a date for the ceremony.
• as a verb: to show the age of something
  This food at this restaurant is delicious but the old-fashioned décor really dates it.

3. Engage

• as a verb: to be involved in some work or an activity
  The students hope to engage in a lively discussion with the visiting professor.
• as an adjective: to have formally agreed to marry someone
  The engaged couple shared the good news with their friends and family.

4. Leave

• as a verb: to go away from somewhere
  Ali leaves for Delhi soon.
• as a verb: to remain
  The ink will leave a stain on my shirt.
• as a verb: to deposit or deliver
  The delivery person leaves Sharmila’s parcels with her neighbor.
• as a noun: to be absent from work or duty
  Gunjan is at home on leave today. She will not be attending the meeting.

5. Novel

• as a noun: a prose, fictionalized narrative in the form of a book that often tells a complex
  story with characters and action
  My mother’s novel about three generations of women from a small town has won the National Book Award this year.
• as an adjective: something that is unique and interesting
  I discovered a novel way to spend less money and save more

6. Park

• as a noun: a public garden or area for recreation
  I am taking my children to play in the park today.
• as a verb: to bring a car or vehicle to a stop for a period of time
  We are leaving for the concert now so that we get a good spot to park the car.

7. Play

• as a verb: to engage in an activity or sport
  We are going to play football today.
  My band is playing at the City Club on Saturday. Why don’t you come check us out?
• as a verb: to act in a dramatic production
  I am playing the role of a politician in my next film.
• as a noun: a theatrical production
  Hamlet is my favorite play of all time.

8. Right

• as an adjective: morally fair, good or proper
  The right thing to do now would be to apologize for your mistake.
• as a noun: morally right or just.
  He doesn’t seem to understand the difference between right and wrong.
• as a noun: something one has legal or moral claim to
  As a citizen of this country I have voting rights.
• as a noun: the direction or location of something
  If you look to your right, you will see the Museum of Natural History.

9. Run

• as a verb: to move faster than while walking
  Don’t run down the street, that’s dangerous!
• as a verb: to go somewhere in urgency or distress (not literally “running”, necessarily)
  Even as an adult, I run to my mother with all my problems.
• as a verb: to contend in a race of some kind
  I intend to run for President four years from now.
• as a noun: a continuous spell of a something
  Souvik has a had a run of bad luck this year.

10. Type

• as a noun: a category of things or people that share something in common
  They sell all types of fabric in that store.
• as a verb: to write something on a keypad by pressing keys
  Wow! You type very fast!

Now that’s a lot of different meanings for only a few words, isn’t it? And if you’ll believe it – many of these words can be used in even more ways than the ones listed here. But don’t be overwhelmed, a good online or print dictionary will help you find all the meanings of any English word you might encounter. And the more you read and speak in English, the stronger your vocabulary will become.

Here’s another great idea – to really power up your vocabulary try a Burlington English course! We have expert teachers on hand to guide you with our spoken English training courses that will take your language learning journey to the next level.

What is Ambiguity?

Ambiguity Definition

Ambiguity is when a word, phrase, statement, or idea has more than one meaning or can be understood in more than one way. Ambiguity typically creates a feeling of vagueness, uncertainty, or even confusion. This can make a reader or audience feel doubt, suspense, and an active desire for clarity or resolution.

Use of Ambiguity in Literature

Since ambiguity allows for more than one interpretation, it is used by writers to create complex, uncertain, and even humorous experiences for readers. Writers may create ambiguity involving the following:

• Words
• Phrases
• Characters
• Plot points
• Situations
• Literary conventions or tropes

As the reader attempts to understand the meanings presented by the writer’s ambiguity, they become more involved and engaged with the writing itself.

Common Ambiguity Examples

Below are some common examples of ambiguity:

• A good life depends on a liver – Liver may be an organ or simply a living person.
• Foreigners are hunting dogs – It is unclear whether dogs were being hunted, or foreigners are being spoken of as dogs.
• Each of us saw her duck – It is not clear whether the word “duck” refers to an action of ducking, or a duck that is a bird.
• The passerby helped the dog bite victim – Is the passerby helping a dog bite someone? Or is he helping a person who has been bitten by a dog? It’s not clear.

Types of Ambiguity

There are four major types of ambiguities as given below.

1. Semantic Ambiguity: This ambiguity is about the semantics of a word or phrase when it is interpreted out of its context.  
2. Syntactic Ambiguity: It occurs when a word or phrase has two or more possible meanings in the given sentence. It is also called structural ambiguity.
3. Lexical Ambiguity: It occurs when a word or phrase has two or more possible meanings or there are two words having the same forms such as homonymy, homophony, or polysemy.  
4. Narrative Ambiguity: It occurs in the plot due to unclarity about the actions of the characters or events or situations or even conflict.

Ambiguity vs. Vagueness

Ambiguity means having more than one interpretation. There is a multiplicity of meanings according to the perspective a person holds about a word or a situation. However, vagueness means it is indeterminacy about meanings. The situation is not clear and the readers face unclarity about the words, phrases, or even sentences. Whereas ambiguity is marked countability of meanings, vagueness is uncountable.

How and Why to Use Ambiguity?

When using ambiguity, a writer takes something out of context and fills it with likely meanings. It could be the use of puns, doublespeak, or tautology. This creates an ambiguity that the readers experience when reading that piece. A writer has various other strategies at hand such as rhetorical devices. Ambiguity is created to make the readers understand things in a different way when direct speech or direct meanings make situations untoward or make readers feel estranged from the writers.

How to Avoid Ambiguity and Why?

It is not difficult to avoid ambiguity. The first thing about avoiding ambiguity is to be explicit, direct, and careful in using adverbs. If verbs, pronouns, and parallelism in sentences are checked thoroughly and minutely, ambiguity is removed. Following steps in writing clear ambiguity.

1. Correct grammar
2. Correct punctuation
3. Shorten your sentences
4. Write step by step

It is better not to use ambiguity in the technical writing and manuals as they create confusion to the readers. It could also be misleading and confusing to follow the instructions and make things work.

Examples of Ambiguity in Literature

Although ambiguity is considered a flaw in writing, many writers use this technique to allow readers to understand their works in a variety of ways, giving them depth and complexity. Let us analyze some ambiguity examples in the literature.

Example #1: The Catcher in the Rye By J. D. Salinger

Read the following excerpt from The Catcher in The Rye by J. D. Salinger:

“I ran all the way to the main gate, and then I waited a second till I got my breath. I have no wind, if you want to know the truth. I’m quite a heavy smoker, for one thing—that is, I used to be. They made me cut it out. Another thing, I grew six and a half inches last year. That’s also how I practically got t.b. and came out here for all these goddam checkups and stuff. I’m pretty healthy though.”

The words “they” and “here” used by the speaker are ambiguous. But the readers are allowed to presume from the context that “they” might be the professionals helping out Holden, and “here” might be a rehabilitation center.

Example #2: The Sick Rose By William Blake

The Sick Rose, a short lyric written by William Blake, is full of ambiguities:

“O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy”

Many of the words in the above lines show ambiguity. We cannot say for sure what ” bed of crimson joy” means; neither can we be exact about the interpretation of “dark secret love.” The ambiguous nature of such phrases allows readers to explore for deeper meanings of the poem.

Some of those who have analyzed this poem believes that “Has found out thy bed / Of crimson joy” refers to making love.

Example #3: Hamlet By William Shakespeare

On a larger scale, ambiguity may develop in a character, or in an entire story. For instance, Hamlet is a morally ambiguous character.

• He kills to avenge his father’s murder
• He is good because he wants to protect his mother
• He is bad because he is willing to kill whom he must to achieve this end

The ambiguity in Hamlet’s character is seen when he is hurt by the death of Ophelia, which is his personal loss, but he does not appreciate the effect that his actions are going to have on others.

Example #4: Ode to a Grecian Urn By John Keats

We find ambiguity in the first line of Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn:

“Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness…”

The use of the word “still” is ambiguous in nature. Here, it may mean “an unmoving object,” or it may be interpreted as “yet unchanged.”

Function of Ambiguity

Ambiguity in literature serves the purpose of lending a deeper meaning to a literary work. By introducing ambiguity in their works, writers give liberty to readers to use their imagination to explore meanings. This active participation of the readers involves them in the prose or poetry they read.

Synonyms of Ambiguity

Ambiguity, as a literary device, has several synonyms or distant meanings. They are equivocation, ambivalence, vagueness, doubtfulness, uncertainty, puzzle, dubiety, doublespeak, abstruseness, and obscurity.

Abbreviation
A reduced version of a
word, phrase, or sentence. Abbreviations are societal slangs.

Absolute
universals Traits,
patterns, or characteristics that occur in all languages.

Acronym
A word that is created
by taking the initial letters of some or all of the words in a phrase
or name and pronouncing them as a word; the
initial letters of some or all the words in a phrase or title and
pronouncing them as a word. This kind of word-formation is common in
names of organizations, military, and scientific terminology.

Adjective
A lexical category
that designates a property or attribute of an entity; it can often
have comparative and superlative degrees and functions as the head of
an adjective phrase

Adverb
A lexical category
that typically denotes a property of the actions, sensations, and
states designated by verbs.

Affix
A bound morpheme that
attaches to a root morpheme; a morpheme that does not belong to a
lexical category and is always bound; bound morpheme, including
prefixes, suffixes, and infixes.

Affixation
The formation of words
by adding derivational affixes to different types of bases; the
process that attaches an affix to a base.

Agglutinating
language A language
where words are formed by adding several morphemes one after the
other, e.g., (Tatar) bala (child) — bala+lar (children)—bala+lar+ga
(to the children)

Allomorph
A variation of a
morpheme; variants of a morpheme ( e. g., [- s], [- z], and [- .z]
are allomorphs of the English plural morpheme).

Allophone
A variation of a
phoneme; a sound representing a given phoneme in certain contexts;
the sounds that make up a phoneme. Allophones are usually in
complementary distribution and phonetically similar.

Ambiguity
More than one meaning
derivable from an utterance.

Amelioration
The process in which
the meaning of a word becomes more favorable; the shift of a word’s
meaning over time from neutral or negative to positive.

Anomaly
Deviation from
expected meaning.

Antonyms
Words or phrases that
have opposite meanings.

Aphesis/
aphaeresis Loss
of one or more letters at the beginning of a word:
story
(history), cello
(violoncello), and phone
(telephone).

Apocopy
Loss of one or more
letters at the end of a word:
ad (advertisement).

Applied
linguistics A
discipline that focuses on practical issues involving the learning
and teaching of foreign/ second languages.

Assimilation
Adjusting in the way a
sound is made so that it becomes similar to some other sound or
sounds near it. A
partial or total conformation to the phonetical, graphical, and
morphological standards of the receiving language and its semantic
system.

Backformation
A word-formation
process that creates a new word by removing a real or supposed affix
from another word in the language; coining
a new word from an older word which is mistakenly taken as its
derivative; the dropping of a peripheral part of a word which is
wrongly analyzed as a suffix.

Base
The form to which an
affix is added; any form to which affixes are appended in
word-formation.

Blend
(blending) A word
formed by joining together chunks of two pre-existing words; a
word-forming process where a new lexeme is produced by combining the
shortened forms of two or more words in such a way that their
constituent parts are identifiable.

Borrowing
(cf.
loan word) Adopting of
linguistic elements, such as morphemes or words of another language;
adopting lexical units or other aspects of one language into another.

Bound
morpheme A morpheme
that must be attached to another element; a morpheme which is always
appended to some other linguistic item because it is incapable of
being used on its own as a word, e.g., -ish. –en, etc.

Bound
root morpheme A
non-affix morpheme that cannot stand alone

Broadening
Change in a word’s
meaning over time to more general or inclusive

Calque
A concept is borrowed but is rendered using the words of the language
doing the borrowing.

Case
ending A marker on a
noun to indicate its grammatical function in a sentence.

Clipping
A process of
word-formation which shortens a polysyllabic word by deleting one or
more syllables, thus retaining only a part of the stem, e.g., lab
(laboratory); word-formation where a long word is shortened to one or
two syllables.

Clitic
A morpheme that is
like a word in terms of its meaning and function, but is unable to
stand alone as an independent form for phonological reasons.

Cliticization
The process where
morphemes act like
words in terms of their meaning or function, but they are unable to
stand alone by themselves: I’m, he’s, etc.

Closed
class (Cf.
Open class) Category
of words that do not accept new members (determiners, auxiliary
verbs, and conjunctions, among others)

Cognates
Words of different
languages which are somehow related in meaning and pronunciation
because they come from a common historical source. Words (with the
same basic meaning) descended from a common ancestor; two, deux
(French), and zwei (German) are cognates (Denham & Lobeck)

Coining
(neologism) Creating a
word.

Collocations
are frequently
occurring sequences of words; the occurrence of two or more words
within a short space of each other in a corpus.

Comparative
method A method where
the systematic comparison of two or more philogenically-related and
non-related languages with the aim of finding the similarities and
differences between or among them; technique of linguistic analysis
that compares lists of related words in a selection of languages to
find cognates, or words descended from a common ancestor

Complementary
pair Two antonyms
related in such a way that the negation of one is the meaning of the
other, e. g., alive means not dead. Cf. gradable pair, relational
opposites.

Complex
word A word that
contains two or more morphemes.

Componential
analysis Analysis
in terms of components; the
representation of a word’s intension in terms of smaller semantic
components called features.

Compositional
semantics The subfield
of semantics where the meanings of the whole sentences are determined
from the meanings of the words in them by the syntactic structure of
the sentence.

Compound
A word composed of two
or more words.

Compounding
Combining one or more words into a single word; a word-forming
process which coins new words not by means of affixation but by
combining two or more free morphemes.

Connotative
meaning/connotation The
personal aspect of lexical meaning, often emotional associations
which a lexeme brings to mind (Crystal, 2005); the set of
associations that a word’s use can evoke.

Constituent
A syntactic unit in a
phrase structure tree; a natural grouping of words in a sentence; one
or more words that make up a syntactic unit; group of words that
forms a larger syntactic unit

Content
words Words with
lexical meanings (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs)

Contrastive
analysis (CA) The
prediction that a contrastive analysis of structural differences
between two or more languages will allow individuals to identify
areas of contrast and predict where there will be some difficulty and
errors on the part of a second-language learner.

Contrastive
lexicology A branch of
linguistics that studies the relation between etymologically related
words and word-combinations in different languages. It deals with the
contrastive analysis of the lexicon, lexico-semantic relationships,
thesauri of entire vocabularies, classification of lexical
hierarchies, and taxonomic structure of specialized terminology

Conversion
A word-formation
process with zero derivation; a
common way to convert one part of speech to another using a form that
represents one part of speech in the position of another without
changing the form of the word at all.

Corpus
linguistics is the
creation and analysis of (normally large, computerized) corpora of
language composed of actual texts (speech and writing), and their
application to problems in descriptive and applied linguistics.

Data
mining Complex methods
of retrieving and using information from immense and varied sources
of data through the use of advanced statistical tools.

Dead
metaphor A metaphor
that is so common that it goes unnoticed as a metaphor

Deep
structure Any phrase
structure tree generated by the phrase structure rules of a
transformational grammar.

Denominal
A word ‘derived from
a noun’, e.g. childish (from the noun child) is a

denominal
adjective.

Denotation
The set of entities to
which a word or expression refers (also called its referents or
extension) (Cf.
Connotation).

Derivation
(morphology) An
affixational process that forms a word with a meaning and/ or
category distinct from that of its base; A word-formation process
that is used to create new vocabulary items, or lexemes, e.g.,
build+er=builder.

Derivation
(syntax) The process
whereby a syntactic structure is formed by syntactic operations such
as Merge and Move.

Derivational
affix An affix that
attaches to a morpheme or word to form a new word.
Derivational morpheme A
morpheme that attaches to a morpheme or word to form a new word.

Derived
word The form that
results from the addition of a derivational morpheme

Descriptive
lexicology A branch of
linguistics that studies the lexicon and lexico-semantic
relationships of a certain language at
a given stage of its development.

Descriptive
linguistics A study
that observes and catalogs languages;
a study that documents
and describes what people say, sign and write, and the grammatical,
lexical and phonological systems they use to do so

Determiner
(det) A functional
category that serves as the specifier of a noun ( e. g., a,
the, and these).

Deverbal
A word ‘derived from
a verb’, e.g. supporter
(from the verb support)
is a deverbal noun.

Dialect
A language variety
that is systematically different from another variety of the same
language and spoken by a socially identifiable subgroup of some
larger speech community.
Dialect atlas A book
of dialect maps showing the areas where specific dialectal
characteristics occur in the speech of the region.

Dialectology
The study of regional
differences in language.

Differential
meaning
The meaning of the semantic component that serves to distinguish one
word from all others containing identical morphemes.

Dissimilation
Process causing two
neighboring sounds to become less alike with respect to some feature.

Distinctive
Describes linguistic
elements that contrast.

Distribution
of a word
The
position of a word in relation to other neighbouring words.

Distributional
meaning The meaning of
a word is considered as the sum total of what it contributes to all
the utterances in which it appears.

Emoticon
A typographic symbol
or combination of symbols used to convey emotion:
Entailment The
relationship between two sentences where the truth of one necessarily
implies the truth of the other; inclusion of one aspect of a word’s
or sentence’s meaning in the meaning of another word or sentence

Enclitics
Clitics which are
attached to the end of the host.

Endocentric
compound A compound
word in which one member identifies the general class to which the
meaning of the entire word belongs.

Epenthesis
The insertion of a
sound inside a word, e.g., dresses [dresiz].

Eponym
A word taken from a
proper name, such as John
for “toilet” (I am going to the john); word that comes from the
name of a person associated with it; the
term which stands for an ordinary common noun derived from a proper
noun, the name of a person, or place.

Etymeme
A bound base that has
etymological relevance ( e. g., — ceive in receive).

Etymology
The history of words;
the study of the history of words.

Etymological
doublets Two words of
the same language which were derived from the same basic word by
different routes.

Etymological
triplets Three words
of the same language which were derived from the same basic word by
different routes.

Euphemism
A word or phrase that replaces a taboo word or is used to avoid
reference to certain acts or subjects.

Exocentric
compound A
compound whose meaning does not follow from the meaning of its parts
(e.g., redneck).

Extension
The referential part
of the meaning of an expression; the referent of a noun phrase. Folk
etymology (False etymology) merely
associates together words which resemble each other in sound and show
a real or fancied similarity of meaning, but which are not at all
related in their origin” (Greenough & Kittredge, 1967, p.145).

Free
morpheme Morpheme that
can stand alone as a word; a morpheme capable of occurring on its
own, such as a word.

Functional
category One of the
categories of function words, including determiner, auxiliary,
complementizer, and preposition. Cf. lexical category and phrasal
category.

Functional
affixes Affixes that
serve to convey grammatical meaning.

Function
word A word mainly
serving a grammatical function in a sentence; a word that does not
have clear lexical meaning but has a grammatical function; function
words include conjunctions, prepositions, articles, auxiliaries,
complementizers, and pronouns. Cf. closed class.

Gapping
The syntactic process
of deletion in which subsequent occurrences of a verb are omitted in
similar contexts.

General
lexicology A branch
of general linguistics
that studies vocabulary irrespective of the specific features of any
particular language and the meaning of words and word-combinations in
isolation and in context.

Grammatical
categories Traditionally
called “parts of speech”; also called syntactic categories;
expressions of the same grammatical category can generally substitute
for one another without loss of grammaticality, e. g., noun phrase,
verb phrase.

Grammatical
meaning
The component of meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual
forms of different words.

Grammatical
valency
The aptness of a word to appear in specific grammatical (or rather
syntactic) structures (Ginsburg et
al.).

Head
(of a compound) The
rightmost word. It generally indicates the category and general
meaning of the compound.

Head
(of a phrase) The
central word of a phrase whose lexical category defines the type of
phrase, e. g., the noun man is the head of the noun phrase the man
who came to dinner; the verb wrote
is the head of the verb phrase wrote
a letter to his mother;
the adjective red is the head of the adjective phrase very bright
red; word whose syntactic category determines the category of the
phrase

Headword
The form of the word
which appears at the beginning of its dictionary entry. It is
normally uninflected and often gives syllabic information.

Heteronyms
Different words spelled the same (i. e., homographs) but pronounced
differently.

Historical
and comparative linguistics The
branch of linguistics that deals with how languages change, what
kinds of changes occur, and why they occur.

Homographs
Words spelled
identically, and pronounced the same or differently; words that have
the same spelling, different meanings, and different pronunciations.

Homonyms
Two or more words that
are pronounced and/ or written the same way; words with the same
sound and spelling but different, unrelated meanings

Homophones
Words that do not
share the same spellings or meanings but sound the same

Hyponyms
Words whose meanings
are specific instances of a more general word; word whose meaning is
included, or entailed, in the meaning of a more general word (tulip/
flower)

Hypothesis
A theoretical
statement that proposes how several constructs relate to one another

Ideogram
A symbol that
represents an idea

Idiolect
An individual’s way
of speaking, reflecting that person’s grammar; the unique form of a
language represented in an individual user’s mind and attested in
their discourse.

Idiom/
idiomatic phrase An
expression whose meaning does not conform to the principle of
compositionality, that is, may be unrelated to the meaning of its
parts; collocation of words or phrases with non-literal meaning; it
has a transferred meaning, e.g., kick
the bucket (die).

Indo-European
The language
reconstructed by linguists which is assumed to be the ancestor of
most European languages; the descriptive name given to the ancestor
language of many modern language families, including Germanic,
Slavic, and Romance. Also called Proto– Indo- European.

Infix
A bound morpheme that
is inserted in the middle of a word or stem; an affix placed inside a
root.

Inflectional
affix An affix that
adds grammatical information to an existing word.

Inflectional
morpheme Bound
grammatical morpheme that is affixed to a word according to rules of
syntax, e. g., third- person singular verbal suffix — s.

Initialism
A word formed from the
initial letters of a group of words.

Internal
change The process
which substitutes one non-morphemic part for another to mark a
grammatical contrast.

Interpreting
The process of
translating from and into spoken or signed language.

Intertextuality
(Tool of Inquiry)

Isogloss
Geographical boundary
of a particular linguistic feature

Jargon
Special words peculiar
to the members of a profession or group;specialized
vocabulary associated with a trade or profession, sport, game, etc.,
e. g., airstream mechanism for phoneticians. Cf. argot.

Jargon
aphasia Form of
aphasia in which phonemes are substituted, resulting in nonsense
words; often produced by people who have Wernicke’s aphasia.

Langue
in structural
linguistics, the set of organizing principles of signs, including
rules of combination

Lexeme
A word in the sense of
an item of vocabulary that can be listed in the dictionary. A lexeme
is a lexical item; the smallest contrastive unit in a semantic system
(Crystal).

Lexical
ambiguity A word or a
phrase that has more than one meaning;
ambiguity as a result
of homonyms

Lexical
category A general
term for the word- level syntactic categories of noun, verb,
adjective, and adverb. These are the categories of content words like
man, run, large, and rapidly, as opposed to functional category words
such as the
and and.
Cf. functional category, phrasal category, open class.

Lexical
decision Task of
subjects in psycholinguistic experiments who on presentation of a
spoken or printed stimulus must decide whether it is a word or not.

Lexical
gap Possible but
non-occurring words; forms that obey the phono-tactic rules of a
language yet have no meaning, e. g., blick
in English. Lexical
gaps occur in a language when it lacks a word for a concept (which
may be expressed lexically in another language).

Lexical
semantics The subfield
of semantics concerned with the meanings of words and the meaning
relationships among words; a study of the conventions of word
meaning.

Lexical
valency
The aptness of a word to appear in various combinations (Ginzburg et
al.)

Lexicographer
One who edits or works
on a dictionary.

Lexicography
The editing or making
of a dictionary.

Lexicology
The study of the
lexicon, or word-stock, its meaning, the relations among lexemes, the
structure of lexemes,
their etymology and lexical units, and relations between lexicology
and other areas of the language: phonology, morphology, phraseology,
lexicography, and syntax.

Lexicon
Our mental dictionary;
stores information about words and the lexical rules we use to build
them.

Lingua
franca A language
common to speakers of diverse languages that can be used for
communication and commerce; a language used as a medium of
communication between speakers of different languages.

Linguistic
competence Unconscious
knowledge of grammar that allows us to produce and understand a
language.

Linguistic
relativity A theory
that language and culture influence or perhaps even determine each
other.

Linguistics
the scientific study
of language.

Linguistic
theory A theory of the
principles that characterize all human languages; the “laws of
human language.”

Linguistic
universal Characteristic
shared by all human languages.

Loan
translations Compound
words or expressions whose parts are translated literally into the
borrowing language, e. g., marriage of convenience from French
mariage de convenance.
Also called calque.

Loan
word A word in one
language whose origins are in another language; a word borrowed into
a language from another language.

Macron
A short straight line
placed above a vowel to indicate that it is pronounced long.

Malapropism
Use of the wrong word which resembles phonologically the intended
word; type of production error by which a speaker uses a semantically
incorrect word in a place of phonetically similar word without being
aware of the mistake.

Marked
In a gradable pair of
antonyms, the word that is not used in questions of degree, e. g.,
low
is the marked number of the pair high/
low because we
ordinarily ask How high
is the mountain? not
How low is the
mountain?; in a
masculine/ feminine
pair, the word that contains a derivational morpheme, usually the
feminine word, e. g., princess is marked, whereas prince is unmarked
(Cf. unmarked)

Markedness
Opposition in meaning that differentiates between the typical meaning
of a word and its “ marked” meaning or opposite (right is
unmarked, and left is marked).

Mass
nouns Nouns that
cannot ordinarily be enumerated, e. g., bread, meat, and milk (Cf.
count nouns).

Mental
lexicon The dictionary
that is in the speaker’s mind; it contains a list of words as well
as rules that help to coin words that are not listed.

Meronymy
A part– whole
relationship between lexemes.

Metaphor
Non-literal meaning of
one word or phrase describes another word or phrase.

Metonymy
Description of
something in terms of some-thing with which it is closely associated.

Mixed
metaphor A metaphor
that comprises parts of different metaphors: hit the nail on the
jackpot com-bines hit the nail on the head and hit the jackpot
(Denham & Lobeck).

Monomorphemic
word A word that
consists of one morpheme.

Morph
Any concrete
realization of a morpheme.

Morpheme
Smallest unit of
linguistic meaning or function; a minimal unit of meaning or function
in a language.

Morphological
motivation
The relationship between morphemes.

Morphological
rules Rules for
combining morphemes to form stems and words.

Morphological
typology Classification
of languages according to common morphological structures.

Morphology
The study of the
structure of words; it also includes the rules of word-formation; the
study of how languages combine morphemes to make words; the
systematic patterning of meaningful word parts, including prefixes
and suffixes; study of the system of rules underlying our knowledge
of the structure of words.

Motivation
The relationship existing between the phonemic or morphemic
composition and structural pattern of the word, on the one hand, and
its meaning on the other (Arnold).

Mutually
intelligible Language
varieties that can be understood by speakers of the two (or more)
varieties.

Narrowing
Change in words’
meanings over time to more specific meanings.

Negation
Causing a statement to
have the opposite meaning by inserting not between Aux and V

Neologism
A newly coined word
which is intended to gain or appears to be gaining common currency in
the language.

Notional
meaning A meaning when
a word expresses ideas, concepts, images, and feelings.

Nyms
Meaning relationships
among words— antonyms, synonyms, homonyms, etc.

Onomatopoeia/
onomatopoeic A word
that mirrors an aspect of its meaning; words whose pronunciations
suggest their meaning; the
naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound
associated with it, e.g., e.g.
cuckoo is onomatopoeic.

Open
form class The class
of lexical content words; a category of words that commonly adds new
words, e. g., nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs; a category of
words that accepts new members (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and
adverbs).

Overgeneralization
Application of a
grammatical rule more broadly than it is generally applied.
Paradigm A set of
forms derived from a single root morpheme; the system of grammatical
forms characteristic of a word, e. g., take, takes, taken, took,
taking; or woman, women, woman’s, and women’s.

Parole
In structural
linguistics, the physical utterance itself; the use of a sign or a
set of signs. Part of
speech Classification
of a word according to its form and function.

Philosophical
semantics The subfield
of semantics that is concerned with logical properties of language.

Phonetical
motivation
When there is a certain similarity between the sound-form of a word
and its meaning when speech sounds may suggest spatial and visual
dimensions, shape, and size.

Phrase A
syntactic unit (NP, VP, etc.) headed by a syntactic category ( N, V,
etc.); a syntactic constituent headed by a lexical category, i.e. a
noun, adjective, verb, adverb or preposition, e.g., with hospitality
(noun phrase).

Phraseology
A subfield of
lexicology that studies phraseological units.

Phraseological
unit A stable
combination of words with complete or partial transferred meaning

Phrase
structure A system of
rules that organizes words into larger units or phrases.

Phrenology
A pseudoscience, the
practice of which is determining personality traits and intellectual
ability by examination of the bumps on the skull. Its contribution to
neurolinguistics is that its methods were highly suggestive of the
modular theory of brain structure.

Pictogram
A picture or symbol
that represents an object or idea; a form of writing in which the
symbols resemble the objects represented; a non-arbitrary form of
writing.

Pidgin
A simple but
rule-governed language developed for communication among speakers of
mutually unintelligible languages, often based on one of those
languages.

Pluralia
tantum refers to a
noun that is morphologically plural but semantically singular
(trousers).

Polymorphemic
Words consisting of
more than one morpheme.

Polysemy
A semantic process
whereby a lexeme assumes two or more related meanings. Pragmatics
The study of language
use in context; the study of how context and situation affect
meaning; study of the meanings of sentences in context (utterance
meaning).

Praxis
is educational jargon
for ‘practice’ or ‘enaction,’ from the Greek verb prattein,
‘to do.’

Predicate
Syntactically, the
verb phrase (VP) in the clause [NP VP].

Prefix
An affix that is
attached to the beginning of a morpheme or stem; an affix that
attaches to the beginning of a root; an affix that goes before the
stem.

Preposition
(P) The syntactic
category, also lexical category, that heads a prepositional phrase.

Prepositional
object The grammatical
relation of the noun phrase that occurs immediately below a
prepositional phrase (PP) in deep structure.

Prepositional
phrase (PP) The
syntactic category, also phrasal category, consisting of a
preposition and a noun phrase.

Principle
of compositionality A
principle of semantic interpretation that states that the meaning of
a word, phrase, or sentence depends both on the meaning of its
components (morphemes, words, phrases) and how they are combined
structurally.

Proclitics
Clitics which are
attached to the beginning of the host.

Productive
Refers to
morphological rules that can be used freely and apply to all forms to
create new words, e. g., the addition to an adjective of —
ish meaning “ having
somewhat of the quality,” such as newish
and
tallish.

Qualitative
research Research that
is done in a natural setting, involving intensive holistic data
collection through observation at a very close personal level without
the influence of prior theory and contains mostly verbal analysis
(Perry, 2011, p. 257).

Quantitative
research A study that
uses numerical data with emphasis on statistics to answer the
research questions.

Reduplication
A morphological
process of forming new
words by repeating the entire free morpheme (total reduplication) or
a part of it (partial reduplication):
wishy- washy, teensy- weensy, etc.

Reference
deals with the relationship between linguistic elements, words,
sentences, etc., and the non-linguistic world of experience (Palmer).

Referent
The object,
relationship, and class of objects outside world to which a word
refers. Regional
dialect A dialect
spoken in a specific geographic area that may arise from, and is
reinforced by, that area’s integrity.

Regionalism
A feature that
distinguishes one regional dialect from others

Register
Manner of speaking or
writing style adopted for a particular audience (e. g., formal versus
informal); a stylistic variant of a language appropriate to a
particular social setting; also called style; language style
appropriate to a particular social setting; a way of using the
language in certain contexts and situations, often varying according
to formality of expression, choice of vocabulary and degree of
explicitness.

Register
tones Level tones;
high, mid, or low tones.

Relational
opposites Pair of
antonyms in which one describes a relationship between two objects
and the other describes the same relationship when the two objects
are reversed.

Retronym
An expression that
would once have been redundant, but which societal or technological
changes have made non-redundant.

Root
The morpheme at the
core of a word to which affixes are added.

Root
morpheme A morpheme to
which an affix can be attached.

Second
language acquisition (SLA, L2 acquisition) The
acquisition of another language or languages after first language
acquisition is under way or completed.

Semantic
features A notational
device for expressing the presence or absence of semantic properties
by pluses and minuses; the smallest component of meaning in a word;
classifications of meaning that can be expressed in terms of binary
features [+/–], such as [+/– human], [+/– animate], [+/–
count].

Semantic
fields Basic
classifications of meaning under which words are stored in our mental
lexicons.

Semantic
motivation
The co-existence of direct and figurative meanings of the same word
within the same synchronous system (Arnold).

Semantic
properties The
components of meaning of a word, e. g., “old” is a semantic
property of man, woman,
wine, story, and
movie.

Semantic
shift Change in the
meaning of words over time.

Semantics
The study of the
linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences; the
study of the meanings of words and sentences; the study of meaning
communicated through language; system of rules underlying our
knowledge of word and sentence meaning.

Semasiology
The science of meanings or sense development (of words); the
explanation of the development and changes of the meanings of words
(Encyclopedia).

Semiotics
The study of sign
systems; the use of sign systems.

Sense
deals with the complex
system of relationships that hold between the linguistic elements
themselves and is concerned with extralinguistic relations (Palmer).

Sentence
semantics The subfield
of semantics that studies the meanings of the sentences and meaning
relations between the sentences.

Shift
in connotation Change
in words’ general meanings over time.

Shift
in denotation Complete
change in words’ meanings over time.

Sign
The abstract link that
connects sound and idea.

Signification
The process of
creating and interpreting symbols.

Signified
In structural
linguistics, the concept, idea, or meaning of the signifier.

Signifier
In structural
linguistics, a spoken or signed word or a word on a page.

Simile
Comparison, usually of
two unlike things, in order to create a non-literal image.

Slang
An informal word or
expression that has not gained complete acceptability and is used by
a particular group; a
word and a phrase used
in casual speech, often invented and spread by close- knit social or
age groups, and fast changing.

Social
dialect A dialect
spoken by a particular social class (e. g., Cockney English) that is
perpetuated by the integrity of the social class (Cf. regional
dialect).

Sociolinguistics
The study of the
relationship between language and society; study of how language
varies over space (by region, ethnicity, social class, etc.).

Special
lexicology A
branch of general linguistics that studies words and
word-combinations, and describes the vocabulary and vocabulary units
of a particular language.

Spoonerism
Slip of the tongue, an
exchange error; a type of speech error where by accident (or
sometimes by design, one suspects) initial sounds in syllables of
neighboring words swap places, e.g., lighting
a fire — fighting a liar

Stem
The base to which one
or more affixes are attached to create a more complex form that may
be another stem or a word. Cf.
root, affix.

Structural
ambiguity The
phenomenon in which the same sequence of words has two or more
meanings based on different phrase structure analyses; ambiguity that
results from two or more possible grammatical structures assignable
to an utterance, e. g., He saw a boy with a telescope.

Structure
dependent (1) A
principle of Universal
Grammar that states
that the application of transformational
rules is determined by
phrase structure properties, as opposed to structureless sequences of
words or specific sentences; (2) the way children construct rules
using their knowledge of syntactic structure irrespective of the
specific words in the structure or their meaning (Fromkin &
Hummel, p. 669).

Style
Situation dialect, e.
g., formal speech, casual speech; also called register.

Subject
Syntactically, the
noun phrase (NP) in the clause [NP VP]

Submersion
method Educating
nonnative speakers of a language in that language, without systematic
accommodations to their native language.

Suffix
An affix that is
attached to the end of a morpheme or stem; an affix that attaches to
the end of a root.

Suppletion
A morphological process that replaces one morpheme with an entirely
different morpheme to indicate a grammatical contrast.

Suppletive
forms A term used to
refer to inflected morphemes in which the regular rules do not apply.

Syncope
The
loss of one or more
letters in the interior of a word:
specs
(spectacles).

Synesthesia
Metaphorical language
in which one kind of sensation is described in terms of another; for
example, a smell may be described as sweet or a color as loud

Synonyms
Words with the same or
nearly the same meaning; words that have similar meanings

Syntax
The rules of sentence
formation; the component of the mental grammar that rep-resents
speakers’ knowledge of the structure of phrases and sentences; the
study of how words combine into larger units.

Taxeme
The basic feature of
arrangement of morphemes.

Theoretical
linguistics builds
theories about the nature and limits of grammatical, lexical and
phonological systems.

Tree
diagram A graphical
representation of the linear and hierarchical structure of a phrase
or sentence; a phrase structure tree.

Typology
The comparative study of significant structural similarities and
differences among languages

Underextension
Use of words to apply
to things more narrowly than their actual meaning.

Valency
A lexico-syntactic property which involves the relationship between,
on the one hand, the different subclasses of a word-class (such as a
verb) and, on the other, the different structural environments
required by the subclasses, these environments varying both in the
number and in the type of elements (Allerton).

Verb
phrase A verb together
with its complements and modifiers; the predicate of the sentence is
a verb phrase (Koln & Funk, 2012).

Word
A
minimal free form; the
smallest linguistic unit capable of standing meaningfully on its own.

Word-formation
The process of coining new words from existing ones.

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